Whiskey Charlie is the debut work of playwright Chris White. If this piece is anything to go by we should be on the lookout for more from this emerging talent. With director Jess Clough-MacRae, the pair forms HippoCrypt Theatre Co.

Roxy Bartle plays Steph, the sometimes sad and overlooked wanna-be actress eking a career from dressing up as a princess. Peter Cottell plays Rick, a jousting chainmail-wearing knight. Both are enhancements for the tourist experience at Warwick Castle.

White’s play takes us behind the smiling façade of professional hospitality to reveal the inner voices of these very ordinary but ornamental workers stuck in their individual forms of limbo. Steph is worried about her mum’s health, is pushed around by a bullying superior and is frustrated at failing an audition. Rick has bigger monkeys on his back, and is fighting his inner anger at the profound loss of a child, a dark place of isolation from which he will occasionally erupt with painful confusion.

Briefly Steph and Rick meet while ‘on duty’, usually when Rick is having a fag break, but there is little in the way of chemistry between them, leaving us with two tangential monologues as duet. There might have been potential in this fleeting relationship had it been allowed to develop more.

Both actors give convincing performances, with little by way of props except their costumes. Bartle has more leg room with Clough-MacRae’s direction, using the stage to good effect to perform her audition, a scene by a coffee machine and a very funny but dark re-enactment of the demise of that ultimate of princesses, Diana. Cottell has to rely more on the power of his voice, strong enough to shock and threaten, but also subtle enough to take us to the quiet pain of his inner thoughts. White captures these moments with some powerful and direct lines.

Throughout there is effective musical accompaniment from composer/pianist/accordionist Hallam Kelly and violinist Nazuma Aida, who use their instruments as sound effects as well as produce atmospheric melodies.

White’s piece leaves us with Steph facing a muted working existence punctuated by disciplinaries. Somewhere within the castle walls Rick will slay a dragon, but a very inappropriate one. There’s a small but hollow victory. “Slipping and slipping…” Pivotal moments in two lives, White holds us in suspension while hinting of darker times to come, and gives credible detail to their inner discourses.

The cosy basement of vegan restaurant Café Kino on the buzzy strip that is Stokes Croft in Bristol is a perfect place to test run new works, the space comparing very favourably with Bristol’s other two small theatres, the Alma and the Wardrobe, with its low semicircular stage offering an intimate connection between actors and audience. ★★★☆☆  Simon Bishop 21/03/15